


[Fairytale of New York]

by Fly



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: F/M, Meet-Cute, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-31
Updated: 2015-07-31
Packaged: 2018-04-12 04:07:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4464866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fly/pseuds/Fly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first encounter between Jack and Rose.</p>
<p>Written as one chapter of a NaNoWriMo back in 2009 (I failed).</p>
            </blockquote>





	[Fairytale of New York]

Jack was walking down Wall Street when he heard a woman say the stupidest thing he'd ever heard anyone say in his life.

"It must have been the Chrysler Building," she said, in a sharp, carefully-enunciated voice, as if trying to convey meaning to someone she didn't think sure would understand her. "Oh, I wish I could remember more clearly – I only watched it once, on my father's knee, when I was little. Are we talking about the remake, with Jack Black and Nicole Kidman?"

Normally, nothing stopped Jack's path. Over the few weeks after transferring, he had developed a route around New York that he carved into the ground like a sigil with his feet. There was no point varying what he did or what he saw; the purpose of his hobby wasn't to do, or to see. He would carry down his route at the allotted time, his body hidden with a black second-hand suit that looked new, his eyes muted with a pair of fake designer sunglasses with orange lenses that he'd bought for ten dollars from a street vendor on the day he first came to the city; and the skyscrapers, and the buildings, and their age and extravagance and splendour, would pull all the identity and significance from him and leave him lost.

But this was too much to ignore.

"Hold on, I'm trying to remember," she carried on, and Jack finally turned his head round. She was dressed in a simple white shirt, forearms arms bared to the sun of the mild spring, and a red leather handbag was hung in the crook of her elbow as she gesticulated with her arms. Her back was to him. "So. King Kong, the monkey, goes up with the girl in his paw, and he gets right to the top of the spire, right? The movie was made in the early thirties, and I know – I know that the Chrysler was the tallest building in the world until they built the Empire State, and that was later on, so..."

The Japanese ladies surrounding her were listening intently, and the woman wiped her face with her hands self-consciously, apparently not used to having an audience. Her dark hair was combed backwards, and fell soft and straight down to her shoulder blades.

"So it'd make sense for them to have King Kong climb the tallest building if they wanted him to look all special and everything. Yeah, I'm sure of it. It had to be the Chrysler."

"No, it's the Empire State," Jack found himself saying.

The dark sweep of the woman's hair fell over her right shoulder as she half-turned.

"Excuse me?"

"And it wasn't Nicole Kidman, it was Naomi Watts."

The woman glanced back over at the Japanese ladies. One of them was smiling, knowingly, and Jack took his eyes off her as the woman turned back around and paced towards him.

"Just what is your problem?" she said, eyes narrowed. She was quite small, her shirt unbuttoned, and her visible collarbones were like tiny foundations bracing against the slender pillar of her neck.

Jack, for a second, doubted what he was doing, but it was soon gone.

"My problem is that you're wrong. You're just – wrong."

"Wow. I've lived here all my life and this is the deepest conversation I've ever had with a stranger." She rocked forward – her white flats wrinkled against the strain of her weight. "Why is it any of your business how wrong I am?"

"You know what? You're right. It isn't any of my business that someone could be so honestly _stupid_ as to not know King Kong climbed up the Empire State," Jack snapped back at her. "Everyone knows that, even if they've never seen the movie."

Her hands slid to the round of her thick hips. "Have _you_ ever seen the movie?"

"I saw the remake."

"The one with Jack Black and Nicole Kidman?"

"Naomi Watts! And yeah! That was the one!"

"Peter Jackson's version."

"Yeah, and in that version, King Kong picked up Naomi Watts and climbed to the top of the Empire State –"

"Well, it was the remake," the woman said, and Jack realised that he'd been slowly backing away from her, slowly approaching ever since she'd noticed he was there. They were now several metres away from Federal Hall, and the Japanese ladies were headed off the other way; Jack imagined them feeling relieved. Quickly, he dropped into step beside her, so as not to look totally submissive. She was carrying on in the same direction, hardly looking round. 

"They're always changing things in remakes."

"Well – yeah," Jack conferred, adjusting his sunglasses. "No point telling the same story twice, right? But they wouldn't change that!"

"Why not?"

"Because that was such a famous scene!"

"Yeah, it was famous," she retorted, bringing her hands together. "Everyone's familiar with the scene of King Kong climbing up the _Chrysler building_."

They turned the corner at Broadway, Trinity Church standing dark and elderly to their right, food stands on the left.

"How long ago did you even see the movie?"

"Not long enough ago for me to forget."

"Because it was the Empire State."

"I clearly remember him going up a slope, like the slope at the top of the Chrysler Building. It's really clear."

"Are you sure that wasn't just the slope leading up to the mast?"

"Is it a mast? They're spires; they aren't ships or anything."

"But are you sure that wasn't it, though?"

"I'm sure. I'm positive."

"Well, your memory's wrong."

"No, yours is."

"I've figured out how it was wrong," Jack added.

"So now I'm not just wrong, I'm mad? Don't you ever give up?"

"You're thinking of _Godzilla_."

"The original Japanese one?"

"No, the remake, with Roland Emmerich."

"Ugh," the woman complained. "I saw that, it was nothing like the original at all."

"You said it yourself. They always change things in remakes."

"But the original was an anti-nuclear allegory. The remake was just a bunch of stuff to shock people. I can't believe they even let it get made."

"But the Chrysler building was in that, when the monster's stomping around and he –"

"Didn't he get killed in that one Japanese film?"

"Which Japanese Film?"

"The Godzilla movie made by that one absolutely crazy Japanese director, the one who did _Versus_. In that movie, the Godzilla kills the Roland Emmerich Godzilla because everyone hated that movie." She shrugged. "I didn't hate it as much as some people did, but there was no way that movie was a classic. Not like King Kong. Are you coming with me?"

"I – I don't know," Jack responded. "Where are you heading?"

"Battery Park."

"The Skyscraper Museum?"

"I want to prove you wrong," the woman said. She swung her arm forward, and the strap of her handbag slid, revealing the slight red mark where it had cut into her skin. "It can't be more than ten bucks for the both of us. And you came along at a great time."

"How do you mean?"

"You came along at a time that I have nothing better to do than go to a museum just to settle an argument with a stranger who thinks he can interrupt my conversations to tell me how wrong I am."

Her words jerked Jack into realising the pointlessness of this whole exercise, and he felt his steps slow. The woman continued ahead, shoulders lowered and purposeful. Her grey three-quarter lengths hugged the cut of her buttocks.

Eventually she realised he wasn't following, and turned again, her head tilted as if she was waiting for him to say something. When he didn't, she called, a little louder over the sound of the traffic.

"If you're doing something else, give me your number."

Jack looked back at her, and then followed.

"Just so happens I have nothing better to do either."

She giggled.

"That's the best I can expect from a man like you. I'm paying."

 

The route from Wall Street to the Skyscraper Museum was a squared-off digital S with a long snake-tail, and the letter stuck in Jack's mental map of Manhattan, embossed deep into it with their feet. They passed the banks, the scent of coffee lounges, a sushi bar with two red Is written out on its logo in square letters like Roman numerals. The woman carried on talking. Jack didn't feel like he was going to get to leave the argument any time soon.

"I remember when Fay Wray died," she said, "and they turned off the lights on the Chrysler Building in memorial."

"But the Empire State's lights are –"

The woman marched up towards the museum's doors, and Jack watched as she rattled the handle. Sheepishly, she walked back to him.

"Well, it's closed," she said, "since it's a Monday. Aren't you lucky you haven't been proven wrong yet?"

She rested her handbag on her raised knee, and teetered a little – Jack reached out a hand to steady her shoulder reflexively, before pulling it back at the feeling of the fire that'd scorched his fingertips. Taking out her phone, she flipped it open, and asked for his name and number.

"I'll meet you here on Wednesday," she said, waving it at him.

Jack opened his mouth, but found he'd forgotten his number. Normally, he forgot very little, but his mind was so blank he was almost unsure he even owned a phone.

"Come on," she encouraged him. "You can trust me."

And suddenly Jack looked up at the Skyscraper Museum, and back over his shoulder at Battery Park, and at the woman standing there with her gaping open bag and her phone, and his insides dissolved into shame. The giddiness of their argument had worn off, and all Jack was able to think about was how far he'd gone from his usual route. And now, giving away his name to a woman he'd only just met – 

– It was just as well he couldn't remember his number.

"Let's – just call the whole thing off," he offered, instead.

The woman frowned at him. Her eyebrows were perfect, soft little curves, thicker than the fashion, drawing his gaze in further to the shadows of her eyes.

"You sure? But we came all this way, and –"

"Come on," he said, waving his arm at the building. "We got way too excited over such a stupid topic. I have things to get on with."

 

He traced the shape of the S again, on his own.

 

Jack didn't think of the woman again, except to beg himself not to think about her. He threw himself into training. He took his frustrations out clearing paths for hostages, and plugging nonexistent bullets into green simulated targets that spun in dimensions he couldn't imagine. Each time, he came a little closer to besting his previous score.

The others in the FOX-HOUND virtual base were as good as him – disillusioned Russian soldiers craving a new life in the States like Mudskipper and Lemur; rehabilitating Genome troops trying to get away from the media while their DNA was unravelled a shot at a time, like Crayfish and Ape; ex-Zanzibari mercenaries with nowhere else to go, like Kestrel and Cavy. This was a situation that had to be rectified as soon as possible. In the virtual environment, they all fought individual battles; fought amongst each other; died, over and over. Dying seven or eight times a day, Jack had no time to think of King Kong and Fay Wray.

He left on Tuesday evening, head still spinning from the out-of-body effect, when he saw someone standing at the end of the base corridor, clutching a handful of papers.

Her.

Jack watched to see what she would do next, but she didn't move. Her body was hidden in a white suit, cleanly pressed, with a pale blue shirt poking from underneath the short sleeves and low collar. She was facing a little to the far of side-on, the black cloth of her soft hair hiding all except the very edge of her fair cheek, the little curl of her eyelashes. There was nothing there of the enthusiastic woman who'd dragged him all the way to Battery Park to prove herself right over the word of a stranger; and in that spirit of anonymity, he called out,

"Is that you?"

 

They tried three different video stores before they finally found one which agreed to loan them a copy. She had insisted on paying, plugging into the store's video rack, copying King Kong to her memory stick – both the original and the remake. She had DRM for seven days with which to watch both versions, she told him.

"I like to see myself as pretty normal, I'm really not that exciting," she started telling him, as they headed back to her apartment. "I guess my main interests are the Internet, and movies – and cooking, too. I grew up in New York. Both my parents did, too. I've got two things from them that have really changed me.

"The first thing was – well, my father, his first name was Fanshawe. He used to have the biggest complex about it, like you would not believe. So he gave me my name, and to compensate he made sure it was really boring."

"What is it?"

"It's Rose," she said.

Jack couldn't resist a smile at that.

"I'm Jack."

Rose's eyes lit up.

"No way. You're kidding. That's way too good a coincidence."

"Maybe we should take a trip across the sea."

"Oh, don't say that. You know how that movie ends," Rose joked, but was unable to hold back a peal of laughter that attracted strange looks from a pair of businessmen sitting on outdoor tables. Jack shot them a glare and moved in closer towards her, feeling like the king of the world.

"So, what's the second thing you got from your parents?"

"Both of them worked in the stock exchange all their lives, it was how they met," she started to explain. Gazing up at him rather than looking where she was going, her heel skidded a on a loose paving slab, and Jack pulled her back as she tripped over. Getting quickly over her embarrassment, she carried on.

"Of course, when the bubble burst, seeing them panicking and crying late at night when I was trying to get off to sleep – that had kind of a powerful effect on me as a little girl. I was just a kid, but I vowed to myself – " she tightened her grip around Jack's forearm – "I promised myself that I would do _anything_ with my life that didn't involve money."

"There's not much out there that fits that description."

"Of course there isn’t!" she replied. "But, you know, when I was in my teens, I got really into this one movie."

"Which movie?"

"A documentary," she explained, "by Holly White, the journalist. It was called _The Man Who Makes The Impossible Possible_. It's the greatest movie."

"I've never seen it," Jack admitted. "What's it about?"

"It's about Solid Snake, the Legendary Mercenary, and the wars he fought in Outer Heaven and Zanzibar Land in the late Nineties," she explained. "Of course, most people have forgotten about all that now since Shadow Moses happened, but – it's such a good documentary. I have it on cartridge somewhere, I'll have to get it onto a disc and lend it to you. She spoke to all the people he went on missions with, the ones who are still alive, and looked at the little bits of footage there are of him and – it's such a shame she never made another movie. I wonder what happened to her?"

"I don't know," Jack said. "Actually, I've never heard of her."

"Not a lot of people have, these days. But anyway, seeing those movies was what got me thinking. I'll never be able to be a soldier like Snake – " she shuddered – "go out there, and – and face the enemy like that, with a gun. But maybe I could help 'save' the men who could. I'll always be a normal girl, but maybe that normalcy could 'save' me, too. After all, what normal person wouldn't worry about the men they were going to send out to war?"

 

Rose's memory stick was plugged into the side of her player. The light was flashing as the memory was accessed, but the screen had long since gone into standby, and neither of them had any intention of turning it back on.

The sounds of the biplanes taking off towards the tower bounced off the walls as Rose undid her top. She sat on the edge of her bed in her underwear, and Jack's eyes kneaded her, took in all of her glorious femininity. He passed his gaze from the tone of her calves to her thick thighs, to the way the fat around her middle rolled out over the elastic of her briefs. For the first time that he could remember, he felt a powerful desire to just take all of her femininity and sink into her until her softness filled all the creases of his muscles, to lose his identity in the perfection that was her body.

King Kong bellowed his way up the tower as he took her shoulders and laid her back.

"Wait," she asked him, through her lips, swollen with the kisses they'd shared earlier.

With the obedience of a soldier, Jack pulled away.

He looked down at her beautiful face, at the makeup smudging around her tea-coloured eyes. For a second, he saw that same look of melancholy on her that he'd seen on her in the base corridor, but then she wrapped her hands around his back, and pulled his stomach down against hers.

"Oh, what the hell," she whispered at him.

 

 

Later, plugged into the VR machines, Jack wondered why he had been imagining so strongly that King Kong had climbed the Empire State in the movie. They'd only had time to watch up to that part in the remake, but it had definitely, unmistakeably been the Chrysler building.


End file.
